RR: Speaking of your origins, it sounds like you’ve gone back to some of that music with the recent Tower of Power album, Great American Soulbook, which I’ve been enjoying quite a bit over the last few weeks.
EC: I’m really proud of the record. It came out really good. Kind of surprisingly good, actually, because it wasn’t something I wanted to do. Once I got into it, and got my head wrapped around it, it went really well.
RR: You touched upon it in the album’s liner notes, but did you want to expand on why Tower of Power did not view a cover album as a creative choice in the past?
EC: We’re into making music of our own so the idea to emulate someone else is not very appealing to us. We’ve never chased any trend. We tried a little bit to chase the disco trend in the late 70s at the urging of our record company, and even then, we sounded like Tower of Power. For a while there, we were down-in-the-mouth over it. “We’re cursed. We can’t sound like the other people, and they want us to. What are we gonna do?”
When we couldn’t get a record label or nothing, but we were still able to play, and there were still lots of fans, and we decided to come out of it, I just told the guys: “You know what, man? It ain’t a curse, it’s a blessing. We sound like ourselves. That’s a blessing. We should do nothing to ever mess with that again.” That was a rule we made, and we stuck by it.
Let’s face it, there’s a lot of people that have done cover records. When the suggestion came up, we said, “We’re not doing that, man. We’re not grasping for straws here. We know who we are.” My manager [Pat Rains] said, “No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m not saying there’s a problem to be solved. I’m saying that—for Tower of Power fans—you’re IT. You guys are IT. You’ve given them the same thing now for years—always an original CD. I just think it could be great if you give them a different slant. I’m not telling you to do it like this other people. I’m sayin’ do it Tower of Power style.”
We were still resistant, you know. Then, he said, “Let me just get a different reaction
from other people, some promoters we work with.” We ran it by these big promoters in Europe and Japan, and they were all in agreement: “If there is anybody in the world that should do this kind of record, it’s Tower of Power. They are the soul band.”
That made sense, but we were still hesitant. We just told him, “Oh, we’ll give it a try, but if we get bogged down, we’re going to abandon the project for an original record.” We started, and I was having a problem with a couple of the guys, health-wise. Things were going slow in the tracking, but I just kept plugging away. I’m pretty good when I decide I’m going to do something. I just keep putting one step in front of the other. By the time we got a third of the way through—these guys they hadn’t really heard it; they did their part and they were gone; I’m the one who is in the studio, putting everybody on, one at a time, afterwards—they were all talking about the tracks, saying, “Yeah, it’s kind of a bummer. The whole vibe is kind of a bummer. Maybe we ought to just start all over.” I said, “No. No. No. No. We are not starting over. These tracks sound good. You haven’t heard them.” And I played it for them. They were like “WOW.” (laughter)
I said, “Trust me, man. I know what I’m doin’ makin’ soul music. I can do this thing.”
Then, everyone said, “I had no idea it could sound that good,” because our state of mind at the beginning of tracking was down-in-the-mouth, and I said, “No, man, the tracks are good, and I have taken it to this place and it’s going to be good.”
RR: Well, I’m relieved you persevered to the end. What I’m enjoying about Great American Soulbook is that it sounds like a really cool Tower of Power show, but you also have these great guests on it, as well as a very consistent flow to the record.
EC: Yeah. Yeah. (laughs) Which surprised me. You know, like I said, when I get committed to something, I’m like an elephant—forward, forward, forward. (laughter)
RR: Let’s talk about the guests.
EC: Oh yeah, sure man. We were really having a hard time to get anyone to guest on it.
RR: Really?
EC: Yeah, absolutely.
RR: People didn’t do their homework?
EC: I was just about at a place where I couldn’t get anybody for this record. We found out that, basically, a lot of people have been doing this guest shot thing. I found out from George Duke [producer of four tracks on the album] that a lot of people have gotten burned, business-wise so a lot of people are more gunshy now about that.
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